Popularity determined by genes

Forget buying people drinks or making them laugh - how popular you are may already be determined by your genes.

Research suggests individuals who are social and popular have descendants with a similar nature.

Over a two-year study, scientists identified friendships in a colony of monkeys. They then established how many friends each friend of an individual animal had, which they analysed alongside 75 years of pedigree data and some genetic studies.

Lauren Brent, who led the study which appears in Nature Scientific Reports, found that popular monkeys also had a big friends-of-friends network - and that many behaviours ran in the family.

She said: "Social success comes from some combination of social skills and temperament, which appear to have a genetic basis."